Today, patients who require hospitalization for medical or surgical treatment generally are seriously ill. Such patients may undergo surgical procedures or may have open wounds which can be the source of disease transmission due to blood exposure and drainage of various bodily fluids.
Despite the significant advances in medical technology, stethoscopes remain an invaluable tool for taking care of patients. Medical care providers, such as doctors and nurses, routinely employ stethoscopes to examine the chests, abdomens, and other areas of patients. These areas may be secreting body fluids contaminated with infectious agents, including viruses such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), thereby resulting in contamination of the stethoscope head. Inadvertently exposing a person having an open cut or wound to a stethoscope harboring infectious agents poses a potentially serious risk of disease.
Today physicians and nurses usually use their own stethoscopes without specific preventive measures. For example, it is common, after examining a patient, to merely wipe the stethoscope off with a paper towel and/or alcohol.
Alternatively, disposable stethoscopes are available, especially in intensive care units or wards where AIDS patients are located. These disposable stethoscopes are relatively inexpensive, but of poor quality. They may be adequate for hearing certain obvious abnormalities, but less obvious findings are usually not possible to evaluate and subtle findings almost certainly go undetected.
Also, the choice of a stethoscope is a personal decision which is based on testing and evaluation of various available models. Some models of stethoscopes may fit the ears of one individual better than other models, and some allow detection of subtle findings that may not be heard with others. The high quality stethoscopes are of course expensive, and to make a disposable stethoscope which provides excellent sound quality is not practical.
At the present time there exists essentially two alternatives: A medical worker may use a disposable, inexpensive but often inadequate and ill-fitting stethoscope, or use a high quality instrument which, even with normal precautions, can remain unintentionally contaminated. It would be very desirable to combine the advantages of high quality stethoscopes with those of disposable stethoscopes, such that high quality stethoscopes may be used with greatly reduced risk for disease transmission.